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How to Increase Education Funding without Increasing Taxes

In the business world, we are always looking for ways to increase output while decreasing costs. This is what the whole quality movement is about. So how do you apply these principles to increase education funding.

First, for the sake of argument let’s just freeze education funding at current levels. If we can provide the same or better education for less money we’ll free up money to do other things. Second, we let’s assume we can change the funding from “butts in the seat” to some other formula we’re the level of quality of education equals funding. I’ll come back to this.

Okay, so what we focus on is dramatically reducing time to proficiency for the middle 60 to 70% of students. I’m leaving out the top and the bottom for right now because the real big dollars are in the middle with all the average kids.

The first step is to define proficiency as the education the average student gets from K-12. At the start, whatever the school system defines as proficiency will be our target. Now, we measure the current time to proficiency. It may be more or less that 13 years but we want a real time to proficiency not just the day you get the diploma.

Now through applying process improvement techniques that allow us to drive out waste and reduce time on the first pass I guarantee you will find 50 to 100 quick hit improvement ideas. A quick hit is anything that reduces time to proficiency and that doesn’t require a lot of time or money. These quick hits come from looking at the current curriculum in depth. (By the way, my definition of waste is anything a student doesn’t remember after the test.)

A lot of quick hits have to do with our courses are arranged, rearranged, combined, modified and deleted. You tend to break down subject and grade barriers and instead start to think in terms of start to finish. For example, you set a reading level and you continue the education until the student reaches that level. Instead of teaching reading in the first grade it may take several year to reach a certain level of speed and comprehension. Quick hits are also trying to match the way people actually learn versus they way we traditionally teach it.

Through this effort you will reduce time to proficiency. Some students will finish in 10 years, some 11, some 12 and some might take 14. In the business world, we’ve always gotten a 30% reduction initially. But let’s say you get a 5% reduction. That means we cut an average education by about 6 or 7 months. What does it 6 to 7 months of education cost a school system? It’s a lot. Now you can take the money and spend it on something like higher teacher salaries or a music program.

You can read all about how this works in a business environment in my book Learning Paths. I’ve also posted a whitepaper in my blog.

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This blog is focused on anything related to learning faster. From time to time, I'll be posting about my book Learning Paths: Increase profits by reducing the time it takes to get up-to-speed (Pfeiffer 2004).
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